From Rehnquist concurring...
IT IS CALLED PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY! Gotta love the last line.
"Each Florida precinct
before election day provides instructions on how properly
to cast a vote, §101.46; each polling place on election day
contains a working model of the voting machine it uses,
§101.5611; and each voting booth contains a sample ballot,
§101.46. In precincts using punch-card ballots, voters are
instructed to punch out the ballot cleanly:
AFTER VOTING, CHECK YOUR BALLOT CARD TO
BE SURE YOUR VOTING SELECTIONS ARE
CLEARLY AND CLEANLY PUNCHED AND THERE
ARE NO CHIPS LEFT HANGING ON THE BACK
OF THE CARD.
Instructions to Voters, quoted in Touchston v. McDermott,
2000 WL 1781942, *6 & n. 19 (CA11) (Tjoflat, J., dissen t-ing).
No reasonable person would call it “an error in the
vote tabulation,” FLA. STAT. §102.166(5), or a “rejection of
legal votes,” FLA. STAT. §102.168(3)(c),4 when electronic or
electromechanical equipment performs precisely in the
manner designed, and fails to count those ballots that are
not marked in the manner that these voting instructions
explicitly and prominently specify. The scheme that the
Florida Supreme Court’ s opinion attributes to the legisla-ture
is one in which machines are required to be “capable
of correctly counting votes,” §101.5606(4), but which none-theless
regularly produces elections in which legal votes
are predictably not tabulated, so that in close elections
manual recounts are regularly required. This is of course
absurd."
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